Use this simple application to move around the world checking on the status of Reactors.

Does not start?

The spinning wheel above may not stop! If you are on a home computer or in the IT department of a company then it will be expected that the wheel will stop spinning quite quickly and the application will start. Many other corporate environments will also allow the applet to work. Our investigations have shown that there are two possible technical reasons for failure.

The first is not having the latest version of Java on your machine. The second is having firewall/proxy-server settings that do not allow externally hosted Java applets to run. We have found that some proxy-server setups will not allow jnlp deployed applets to make an initial outgoing connection on a random port. If the above application does not start then you can turn on the Java console to investigate the cause. On Windows: Start/Control Panel/Java/Advanced - then under Java console click 'Show Console'.

The above application works like Google maps. You can move around the earth and see in real time the coloured status of reactors, and double click on one to see a real time graph of its recent history. When one of the reactors gets to an emergency state then you are automatically taken to the trouble spot.

JavaFX is still being developed and areas such as its charting abilities should be expected to improve over the coming months. For charting and any other areas where JavaFX is still immature there are many other options available, not least of which is to use a Swing charting package. The above application uses JFreeChart for charting.

Before we work out an exact order of execution we need to talk in terms of the overall theory of the task at hand. The line we are going to take in this section will take the form of question and answer. We want to arrive at the simplest possible first Strandz/JavaFX application as quickly as possible. In doing so, and just as a first pass, we will skip anything that appears not to be essential. These not-so-essential tasks can then be ordered lower down on our final order of execution.

The first thing to say is that our target application is all UI code to be JavaFX script, apart from the odd use of a specialized library where JavaFX is lacking. So our target application will start with a run() method that contains a Stage that has a Scene which arranges its content of Nodes.

Do we need to translate SdzBeans into JavaFX? The answer is no - JavaFX works well with Java classes. You can use the new keyword for instantiation and call methods on Java objects. The answer would probably be different if our aim was to be able to create SdzBeans at design-time, as the persistence format may well be JavaFX objects only. We can investigate this further when the JavaFX Designer comes out.

Is there an existing very simple application that creates its own SdzBag on startup? Yes. At Basic Theory there is a link to a file called WorkerAppHelper. This file creates all the SdzBeans necessary to run the application.

Where would you expect to find problems with translating this app? In any Strandz application data and user interface meet up at Attribute. There should not be any issues on the data side. The data will be made up of Java DOs no matter whether the application is JavaFX or Swing. It is not intended that JavaFX become anything other than a language for writing UIs.

Problems would be expected to be found where an attribute binds data to UI items. Currently an attribute expects items to be Swing JComponents. The equivalent of a JComponent is a javafx.scene.Node. So our essential first step will be to generify Strandz so that it will be able to work with both types of control hierarchies (JavaFX scene graph trees and Swing container hierarchies). Strandz code needs to have its own abstract concept of a control. A tiny program will need to be written that creates a FieldAttribute and tries to set it using the setItem() method with a javafx.scene.control.TextBox. Once this is compiling we need to test that that Attribute can work with the JavaFX control. To do this we can directly set the TextBox's text value, and then try to fetch it through the Attribute using getItemValue().

Work in Progress...